It is four years since I launched the idea of Total Place as a way of ensuring that we improved the quality of services to citizens and delivered better value for money by realising the potential of all local resources whether state, voluntary or private.

This is not a plea to resurrect Total Place, because that won't happen. But it is a plea for government to offer a more convincing alternative than we have seen so far. The events of recent months have served only to underline the need for urgent action.

We have seen children once again failed and abused as a result of agencies not working effectively together. We have seen continued confusion about just what the government's commitment to decentralisation means in practice, with conflicting signals from the Department for Communities and Local Government and a persistent lack of enthusiasm from other departments.

We have seen yet more evidence of how Whitehall finds it difficult to co-operate to tackle cross-cutting issues or to commission or procure competently and we have had no greater success in getting health, housing and social care to work together to address the challenges associated with increasing numbers of elderly people.

Concern about this particular issue prompted the House of Lords to establish a new select committee, on which I sit, to look at the future of public services, with particular reference to the elderly. In recent weeks I have been reading through the substantial and impressive evidence we have already received from a wide range of different agencies – public, private, national, local, state and voluntary – and I have been struck by the common themes emerging.

Services for the elderly are compromised by a lack of collaboration between agencies; there has been insufficient emphasis on prevention and early intervention to ensure that people are better prepared and equipped to deal with old age. There is a lack of small practical interventions which can make all the difference to older people, such as the availability of a local handyman. There is little done to make the best use of community resources such as private community pharmacies to reduce the load on GPs and A&E departments. Planning restrictions make it unnecessarily difficult to build extra-care housing that could reduce the need for more traditional care accommodation, and it is claimed that we have failed to involve older people in developing policy or designing services.

Without in any way wishing to prejudice the outcome of the select committee, I, for one, am left with a feeling that our response to this challenge has been less than adequate. I am also struck by the need for future action to be based much more locally than in the past, and much better co-ordinated. I cannot see how the problems identified can be resolved by yet more centralised, top-down policies.

This lack of effective local integrated action is not because local agencies do not see the need, but because they are often constrained by the fragmented, overly centralised governance model we have developed over a period of30 years or more. National policies will always be necessary to provide frameworks for local action, but we have to find ways of freeing up localities and local people to use all their resources to address their priorities.

Somebody has to be given the lead in achieving this and they need to accept that their role is one of commissioning, not always direct delivery. And the local authority has the best democratic mandate to take on that role. There are problems, of course. Central government seems still not to trust local government despite the prime minister having paid tribute to local authorities as the most efficient form of government. For their part, local authorities have sometimes seemed keener to extend their direct powers than commission solutions for their community. Some local authorities have failed to develop a constructive relationship with civil society, which is critical to success, and professional boundaries still get in the way of sensible joined up action.

However, the simple fact is that the current centralised arrangements are deeply flawed and will never deliver adequate services to the most disadvantaged. Surely the time has come for us to try something different? What Total Place did show us was a real appetite for co-operating for the good of the area – and not just in large urban areas.

We don't need more research, limited experiments and pilots. We need a genuine commitment to devolving real power to localities.

Lord Michael Bichard has been a cross-bench peer since 2010. A former permanent secretary, he has served as a chief executive in both central and local government